Staticfree Blog

I got frustrated with the lack of a Lojban text to speech voice for Festival last night, so I put one together. It took a bit of research, but I've grown to like Festival's engine. It's all lisp with a C++ core. As Lojban has an entirely phonetic textual representation, it was easy to hack together a phoneme mapping an existing diphone collection for Lojban. (in other words, I didn't have to record myself speaking to make it go).

In stopping by the Lojban IRC channel, I found out that someone has recorded some diphones for Lojban (albeit with a French accent). Best yet, the recordings are indexed by phoneme-pair. With a bit of work (listening to 1186 wav files and labeling where the key parts of the waveform are) we can have a Lojban text-to-speech that's got its own voice! Of course, I don't have this much time to spend on such, but who knows. Maybe my 16h of bus riding will prove to be productive.

Well, I've finally put together an avi of an old project I started 4-5 years ago. The output is viewable here (high quality or low quality). It's fairly short, about 40 seconds, but took quite awhile to render (a few days). Of course, this is on one 900MHz machine and in Wine, so performance is not to be expected. Also check out one of the stills I put together a few days ago.

In reading through the lastest Wired, I came across an übergeeky product. It reminds me of a very toned down version of my childhood fantasies of my ultimate throne room. Aww yeah. I'm now re-rendering the animation that still went with, as I've finally got the disk space to store all hundreds of TGA files. It should be available as an mpeg someday soon.

I've also been playing around with Apache::Gallery for my photo collection. I had to tweak the code a little bit and the templates a lot, but I think I'm quite fond of the results. The dynamic resizing is really handy. If I ever get around to it, I'll hack it so that it will respect Exif orientation tags.

Way back in elementary school, in what must have been chorus, I learned one of my favorite songs. It's a simple, beautiful song: goodnight in many different languages. I've finally found it, it's called Dreams of Harmony by Joanne Hammil. Here is an encoded version of the lyrics:

Good night, bonne nuit, お休みなさい,
buenas noches, lala salama, 晚安,
Спокойной ночи, Gute Nacht, לילת טוב.

Where ever you rest your head tonight
we are all one family, let's hold tight
and fill the world with dreams of harmony tonight.

Except for the Swahili (which I can't find any encodings for) the above should be correct in the language's native characters. Mouse-over to see the phonetic pronunciation.

Title credits to A. Katsaris.

Primecard has finally paid me! As soon as I manage to get my final pay check deposited, I'll officially be non-broke for at least a good 45 minutes until I start writing checks for people I borrowed money from. It will be a good 45 minutes though, that's for sure.

I've been spending a bit of time organizing stuff. I've mostly gone through my SME RC and photos directories. I've finally put all my scripts into CVS so I can keep all my systems (µ, xxv, warehaüs[well, that's not entirely mine], and spot) up to date. Best yet, I've actually done some code cleanups so that there's no more site-specific paths in the source. Lastly, I spent a few hours poking at some scripts to clean up the music on bfg. I also categorized a bunch of directories; we now have a yé-yé category (at least it's not yet another artist put in "rock"). All in all, things are running much more smoothly.

Stuff with Amethystmoon and myself is odd. I think I'm beginning to understand what good friendship really is and precisely how frustrating relationships can become when 400 miles are placed in the middle of them.

Someone definitely needs to invent sky-hooks.